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It's the black konsole window. You need to change your gamma to an insanely high value to see it: $ xgamma -gamma 3 ... or something. Or make the picture brighter with kuickshow (b-key) or gimp. Gwenview doesn't support that. :-(

I know this is slightly off-topic, but since freedesktop.org and the X Server where brought up in this article, I enjoy seeing the faster and more flexible progress the open source world will witness thanks the new fork of X.

freedesktop.org hosts two different X server projects, one called Kdrive (a small testbed X server that Keith used to develop Xdamage, Xfixes, etc. afaik) and the X.org X server tree, which is very similar to XFree86 4.4, but now has those extensions as well, I think. Which one does this article refer to? It would be nice if it were updated to prevent such confusion in the future.

Well, the distinction may become less important soon. There is an effort to port KDrive's new extensions (the ones which make possible transparent windows and stuff) to the X Server that is based on the old XFree86. Once that happens it won't matter which server you're running.

I don't use konsole cause when I try to use iptraf or "make menuconfig" I get that "This program requires a screen size of at least 80 columns by 24 lines
Please resize your window" so I open an xterm and it just works. is there a way to make konsole work with this kind of app?

Which widget theme is that?
How do I get drop shadows behind window frames like that - IIRC there was support for that in kde 3.2 betas and then it disappeared by final release?
Is that ksmoothdock at the bottom?

The theme is plastik, the windec is baghir 0.4pre5, the icon theme is cristal real svg 0.5 (only for kde 3.2 and better) ---> http://themes.freshmeat.net/projects/crystalrealsvg/
dropshadows come from fdo xserver...they are native, you can have a similar effect using a patch for kde 3.2 and cvs..you can find it in kde-look.org
:)

Any support for drop shadows before now was only a hack, and would behave badly when moving windows or when shadowed windows changed their contents underneath the shadow. Drop shadows and the like require extensions to the X server to work correctly. Those extensions are still in development and are not being shipped with any current distribution that I know of. They will come eventually, though.

the city of Bergen in Norway decided to switch from windows to linux and according to that zdnet article ( http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5238146.html?tag=zdfd.newsfeed ) , they choose Suse over Red Hat because:
"We consider SuSE being ahead of Red Hat technically," with earlier 64-bit versions, better support for multiple languages and a focus on the KDE graphical interface. "

It surpasses gnome-terminal and konsole on a feature no other ever tried to implements :
you can split tab vertically/horizontally, as much as you need, and still have multiple tab. It's damn usefull when you need to have multiple terminals visible.
Sure, you could just fire a few "New window" up, but :
1) you have to resize/manage them to get the desired layout, with maximized visible part
2) This is as many processes forked (multi-gnome-terminal only forks the shells)
3) if you want to use 2-3 of these layouts, you have to waste as many workspace (whereas in mgt, all this goes to tab layout).

Sure, it's a kinda abandoned project (it's gtk-1, and there's no update since April 2003), and it doesn't have as much eye candy as Konsole, but that would be so nice if any of the current fashioned terminal emulator would pick up those features...

The article may have praised konsole for some innovative features, but one of the strongest concerns voiced by the author was the drive for silly transparent backgrounds and images etc. which do nothing to help the user read the text. So you follow on from reporting on the praise with a screenshot of pointless eye candy...